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Charles Schumer DNC speech (text, video)

I stand here tonight as a proud son of the great state of New York! I'm also a proud product of the middle class. My father, Abe, was a small businessman. For 32 years, he ran an exterminating company. That may explain why our family always associated the smell of roach spray with love.

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But dad's job brought stress. On Sunday nights, I'd lay in bed and hear him pacing the floor, restless about returning to work Monday morning. But what drove him were his big hopes for his kids' futures. He believed if you worked hard and played by the rules, you could pass a better life on to your children.

Today, families like the one I grew up in still believe in that American dream. But as President Obama says, it's a make-or-break moment for the middle class.

Mitt Romney's plans would make things worse. We've tried trickle-down tax cuts for the wealthy and "anything goes" for big corporations. We tried it under a president who billed himself as a "compassionate conservative." It didn't work. Now we have Mitt Romney, calling himself a "severe conservative."

The last Republican president gave huge tax cuts to millionaires that exploded our deficits. Mitt Romney not only wants to make those tax cuts permanent, he wants to add more tax breaks for the wealthy that would make our deficit even bigger.

The last Republican president tried to privatize Social Security. The Romney-Ryan ticket says, "Why stop with Social Security when you can privatize Medicare, too?" The last Republican president gave us an ultra-conservative Supreme Court. Mitt Romney would move the Court even further right, putting landmark decisions like Roe v. Wade at risk. Some say Romney would repeat the past. I disagree—he'd be worse.

Take taxes. When Mitt Romney says he wants to reform the tax code, hold on to your wallets. We know Mitt Romney never met a tax haven he didn't like. But his new favorite tax haven is actually not the Cayman Islands—its Paul Ryan's budget. Under this plan, Mitt Romney's own taxes would drop to almost zero. But for the middle class, it's a rip-off. Families with children whose household income is less than $200,000 would see their taxes go up $2,000, on average. That's not trickle down. That's a dirty trick.